Sparseness‐constrained least‐squares inversion: Application to seismic wave reconstruction

Abstract

The spectrum of a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is estimated by linear inversion, and used to produce desirable seismic traces with regular spatial sampling from an irregularly sampled data set. The essence of such a wavefield reconstruction method is to solve the DFT inverse problem with a particular constraint which imposes a sparseness criterion on the least‐squares solution. A working definition for the sparseness constraint is presented to improve the stability and efficiency. Then a sparseness measurement is used to measure the relative sparseness of the two DFT spectra obtained from inversion with or without sparseness constraint. It is a pragmatic indicator about the magnitude of sparseness needed for wavefield reconstruction. For seismic trace regularization, an antialiasing condition must be fulfilled for the regularizing trace interval, whereas optimal trace coordinates in the output can be obtained by minimizing the distances between the newly generated traces and the original traces in the input. Application to real seismic data reveals the effectiveness of the technique and the significance of the sparseness constraint in the least‐squares solution.